Child marriage, abroad & at home

Pending in the U.S. House of Representatives is a bill to combat child marriage around world.
The International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010 (S. 987) unanimously passed the Senate 11 days ago. The bill finds, inter alia:

Child marriage, also known as 'forced marriage' or 'early marriage', is a harmful traditional practice that deprives girls of their dignity and human rights.

and:

Child marriage as a traditional practice, as well as through coercion or force, is a violation of article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, 'Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of intending spouses'.

Citing the frequency with which under-18 girls (girls in particular, though elsewhere the bill mentions boys, too) marry, in countries like "Niger, Chad, Mali, Bangladesh, Guinea, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, and Nepal," the bill would:
► Authorize the U.S. President to work with "multilateral, nongovernmental, and faith-based organizations" to develop a child-marriage-prevention strategy that includes "education, health, income generation, changing social norms, human rights, and democracy building"; and
► Require that information about the nature and prevalence of child marriage be included in the annual Country Reports published by the U.S. Department of State.
No word on when such legislation might be taken up in the House.
Movement in that direction received a notable boost last week, in a Washington Post op-ed published jointly by Mary Robinson (right), formerly the President of Ireland and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa, and winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. Members of The Elders group established by former the South African President and Nobel Peace Prizewinner, the 2 wrote:

As members of an independent group of leaders who were asked by Nelson Mandela to use our influence to address major causes of human suffering, we have never been involved in supporting a specific piece of legislation before, but we believe that investing in efforts to prevent child marriage is critical to global development and the achievement of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. We applaud the Senate for passing this forward-looking legislation and urge the House of Representatives to follow suit.

Against the backdrop of these recent legislative efforts, an item discovered in the Library of Congress archives jumped out.
A captivating account of early 20th C. "women's editions" published by the mainstream U.S. press included the Louisville Courier-Journal clipping at left, entitled "Black List of States". Listed was the legal limit "at which fathers, brothers, and husbands have placed the age at which a little girl may consent to her ruin" -- that is, the age at which she could become a child bride in the United States.
In all but 3 states (Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming), the age was under 18.
The youngest age of legal consent?
7 years, in Delaware.
The date?
1895, just 53 years before adoption of the Universal Declaration to which the pending legislation refers.

Read On! International Law/Human Trafficking

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Anne Gallagher, who contributes this Read On! guest post)

My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to write about my book The International Law of Human Trafficking, published this month by Cambridge University Press.

This book has evolved out of more than a decade of writing and practice. It reflects experiences and insights from my working life as a UN official, as a teacher and scholar of international law, and as a practitioner in the field. It builds on my research of the past few years, which has included:

► A first-hand identification of the essential elements of an effective criminal justice response to trafficking, set forth in a 2008 article co-authored with Paul Holmes;

► A detailed legal commentary to the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking that will be released by the United Nations shortly;

► A 2009 feature article, published in the Virginia Journal of International Law, which refutes James Hathaway’s critique of the international legal response to trafficking;

► A study, with IntLawGrrls' guest/alumna Elaine Pearson, of the legal and policy implications of shelter detention for victims of trafficking, published this year in Human Rights Quarterly and also the subject of a previous IntLawGrrls post; and

► A critical analysis of the first decade of the annual U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Reports, to be published in Human Rights Review in early 2011.

As I write in the introduction to my new book, The International Law of Human Trafficking is not a specialist treatise in the usual sense. More accurately, it represents an attempt to apply the science and tools of international law to a specific, contemporary issue. From this perspective it is as much about sources of international legal obligation, the formation of international law, the doctrines of responsibility, and theories of compliance, as it is about trafficking.

The book’s focus is essentially a problem-solving one: the international community has identified trafficking as a problem, and has decided that law will be used to structure and enable at least part of the solution to that problem. By providing a clear and organized explanation of the law as it is, the capacity of those who are in a position to use international law to hold states and others to account is hopefully strengthened.

Documented is what former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson (left), in her review of my book, has called

the extraordinary developments of the past decade

that is, changes in laws, policies and practices that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago.

The book concludes that these advances, while remarkable when viewed in historical perspective, are nevertheless fundamentally constrained in terms of both vision and effect. States are able to record relatively high and improving levels of conformity with international legal rules related to trafficking in large part because those rules, in the end, do not demand a great deal. The rules request, but do not compel, states to take positive action to address the root causes of trafficking, not least what the “thoroughly modern anarchist” Emma Goldman more than a century ago called

the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labour.

The rules acknowledge the link between trafficking and the massive labor migration that greases the wheels of the global economy, without requiring States to provide individuals with safe and legal avenues through which to move. They affirm the principle of nondiscrimination, without insisting that the rules, attitudes and practices that render women, children and migrants most vulnerable to trafficking-related exploitation be immediately and comprehensively dismantled.

It is currently possible for a state to find itself within the letter, if not the spirit of its international legal obligations merely by criminalizing trafficking, diligently investigating cases that come to its attention, cooperating with other States when requested, and taking at least some measures to support and protect identified victims. While my book has hopefully succeeded in fleshing out these basic obligations, it acknowledges that the obligations do not, even in expanded form, amount to terribly much. Like a commitment to halt anthropogenic climate change by imposing emission reductions that have, in truth, no hope of meeting that goal, there is a fatal gap between what is legally required of states and what is actually needed to reach the stated objective.

A genuine commitment to ending trafficking and related private exploitation requires us to both acknowledge and challenge the limitations of the contemporary international legal imagination.

Quotes from Women on Law and Justice

Here at University College Dublin School of Law we are moving towards completing our fantastic new building for the Sutherland School of Law (take a tour here), under the academic directorship of Professor Imelda Maher (right). One of the features of the School will be a corridor of quotations about law and justice coming, not only from lawyers, but from people of all walks of life: politicians, activists, novelists, poets etc...
As we finalise these quotes, I was wondering whether you--lovely readers--had suggestions for quotes from women on the themes of law and justice. My personal favourite, so far, is from Mary Robinson, who said:

In a society where the rights and potential of women are constrained, no man can be truly free. He may have power, but he will not have freedom.

What are your favourite quotes from women about law and justice?

On November 7

On this day in ...
... 1990, Ireland voted into office the country's 1st woman President. Chosen in a runoff contest was Mary Robinson (left), who'd run as an Independent. Nominated by the Labour Party and the Workers' Party of Ireland, as well as by independent senators, she was "the first elected president in the office's history not to have had the support of Fianna Fáil," a party long dominant in Irish politics. Of her election, the BBC wrote:

Mrs Robinson, a Dublin barrister, is considered radical by Irish terms.
A civil and human rights lawyer, she has campaigned for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting divorce and abortion for more than 20 years.
However, she not only won the support of women countrywide but also polled well in traditionally conservative rural areas.
The mother-of-three has been a member of the Irish Senate for more than 20 years.

In her subsequent post as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002) Robinson would not be free of controversy, either. Most recently, an online campaign has sought to draft her to become the 1st President of the European Council. She's said she doesn't want the job, but her name surfaced again in a recent Time magazine article.

(Prior November 7 posts are here and here.)

The Ruggie Portal: A Global Town-Hall Meeting

IntLawGrrls members and readers will want to know that, on July 30, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre in London launched a new online portal to all of the work of UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights, Professor John Ruggie.
This free portal, which is available here and can also be reached via the Resource Center homepage, includes all of Professor Ruggie’s reports to the UN Human Rights Council, papers, speeches, materials on his consultations with stakeholders, and commentaries. The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs deserves appreciation for making a grant to fund the new portal.
In the press release about the launch, Professor Ruggie said:

This portal is an indispensable tool that enables real-time exchange of information and dialogue to take place between the mandate and stakeholders all over the world. It constitutes our own version of an ongoing global town-hall meeting, where everyone can be heard and participate in the strengthening of the international human rights regime as it relates to business.

According to its website, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre tracks the human rights impacts (positive & negative) of 4500 companies in over 180 countries. Issues include discrimination, labour rights, security & conflict zones, killings, torture, displacement, environmental abuses affecting human health, access to medicines, poverty and development. The site is updated hourly and receives 1.5 million hits per month. Mary Robinson chairs its 80-member International Advisory Network.

Exit Arbour, enter Pillay

Just days after the departure of Louise Arbour -- subject of this New York Times profile and this prior IntLawGrrls post -- comes news that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon likely will tap Navanethem Pillay (below right) as the next U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
As we've written, Pillay

'is a product of apartheid South Africa,' having been born in Natal in 1941, 1 of 4 daughters in a family headed by a bus driver. She was the 1st woman of color to start a law firm in her hometown.

Also the 1st black woman to be appointed to the High Court in South Africa, Pillay served as a Judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda from 1995 to 2003; the last 4 of those years she was the ICTR's President. Among her achievements at the ad hoc tribunal was to bring attention to gender-based violence. Since 2003, Pillay's been a Judge on the International Criminal Court.

Though she'd be the 1st human rights commissioner from Africa, and the 1st from a southern region outside South America, Pillay would not be the 1st woman human rights commissioner. Others among the 5 persons who've held the position include the former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, and, of course, Pillay's immediate predecessor, Arbour. (The latter 2 and 3 other international law women were honored in Vanity Fair last fall.)

Inspiring choices, all.

Au revoir (presque) à Louise Arbour

Louise Arbour will step down from her position as U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights on June 30, thus concluding her 1st term in that position without seeking a 2d term.
Arbour (right) made the announcement yesterday, days after opening the current session in Geneva of of the Human Rights Council.
As did a recent predecessor in the position, former Irish President Mary Robinson (below), the Montreal-born Arbour (prior posts here) has called a number of countries on the carpet for pursuing policies that falls short of meeting international human rights obligations. They include China, Zimbabwe, and, the United States. Yesterday's N.Y. Times story wrote of her claim last year that

the so-called U.S. war on terror was eroding the worldwide ban on torture, noting reports of secret U.S. detention centers. John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time, said it was 'inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we're engaged in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers.'

The same story said that Arbour -- who, as we've posted, was the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia responsible for the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and who also is a former Justice on Canada's Supreme Court -- said that family concerns and not criticism drove her decision:

She acknowledged that she found much of the criticism hurtful, but she said she was not quitting because of it. 'On the contrary, I have to resist the temptation to stay to confront it.'

Here's hoping her successor's another feisty steward of international human rights.

On May 21, ...

... 1944, Mary Robinson, the 1st woman to serve as President of Ireland and, thereafter, the United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights, was born in Ballina, County Mayo, Ireland. She now leads the New York-based NGO Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative.
... 1932 (75 years ago today), inclement weather forced Amelia Earhart, aviator, feminist, pacifist, and namesake of IntLawGrrl Elena Baylis, to end her solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean -- 1st ever by a woman -- in Gallagher's field, County Derry, Ireland (pictured). Earhart landed 5 years to the day that Charles Lindbergh had completed his own solo trans-Atlantic flight.